Start-Up Previews (5/02)
Executive Summary
A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in the current issue of Start-Up. This month's profile group, Hospital-Acquired Infections, features profiles of Entomed SA, Infectio Diagnostic Inc., MedMined Inc. and Microbia Inc. Plus these Selected Start-Ups across Health Care: Cardio-optics Inc., Immunocept LLC, Nucleotech LLC and Xenerate AB.
A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in
the current issue of START-UP: Windhover's Review of Emerging
Medical Ventures
This month's profile group:
Hospital-Acquired Infections
Entomed SA is attempting to develop
therapeutics by exploiting the vast wealth of biodiversity found in
the world's insects. The company's focus is on both small- and
large-molecule drugs for infectious disease and cancer; its most
advanced product is an antifungal peptide for the treatment of
hospital-acquired infections in immunosuppressed patients.
The two-to-three day delay in accurately diagnosing bacterial
infections encourages their transmission and contributes to
antimicrobial resistance through the inappropriate use of
antibiotics. Infectio Diagnostic Inc.
wants to bring microbiology into the 21st century with a rapid
DNA-based test that will identify bacteria from a blood, urine, or
tissue sample within an hour.
MedMined Inc. aims to help hospitals make better use of
existing data to improve surveillance and control of nosocomial
infections. The company claims that its proprietary data mining
technology can identify ten times more infection patterns than
traditional surveillance methods, find them more quickly, and in
doing so help hospitals pinpoint and correct the quality breakdowns
that are contributing to their transmission.
By understanding how bacteria and fungi act in networks and
change in response to their environment, Microbia Inc.
hopes to create new antifungal and
antimicrobial drugs that work in fundamentally different ways than
the drugs that are available today.
Start-Ups across Health Care
Blood is not only thicker than water, it is a great deal more
opaque—a property that makes it difficult for interventional
cardiologists to navigate in and around the heart. Cardio-optics
Inc. is developing a new intracardiac
imaging technology that will allow surgeons to see directly forward
through blood in real time, to help them accurately perform a large
variety of therapeutic and diagnostic procedures in blood-filled
environs.
Targeting sepsis, a $2 billion market for which no widely
successful therapeutics exist, Immunocept LLC
hopes to offer a therapy that, like kidney
dialysis, removes blood from the body, filters mediators of sepsis
from the blood in an extracorporeal device, and returns the
filtered blood back to the patient.
Cell therapy start-up Nucleotech LLC
is developing an in vitro method
for reprogramming mature cells, transdifferentiating them into
other kinds of mature cells for autologous therapeutic use against
diabetes, cancer, cardiac disease and a host of other
indications.
By marrying gene therapy with medical device technology,
Sweden's Xenerate AB believes it can
make implantable vascular devices—artificial grafts and
stents—capable of endothelialization, thus improving their
biocompatibility and reducing the incidence of intimal hyperplasia,
restenosis and other adverse effects.
